Editorial April 17, 1909 Issue

BOTH BANEFUL AND INCONGRUOUS

John B. Willis

When the late Canon Farrar's volume on "The Eternal Hope" appeared about the year 1878, it awakened a convulsive and declamatory protest from so large a number of clergymen as to give convincing evidence of the hold which the doctrine of eternal punishment still had upon Christian belief at that time. Today it would probably be difficult to find any considerable number of educated Protestant ministers who accept this phase of the Miltonic theology, and this for the reason that it involves a questioning of the equity of the divine government from which the moral sense of every open-minded man must instinctively revolt. All the world knows that if the moral character of God is not unimpeachable, then He is no longer God, and the foundation of all Christian faith is hopelessly shattered.

This assertive discontent with the doctrine of the possible endlessness of retributive suffering results, however, not only from its reflection upon the justice of God, but from the indisposition of human sense at its best to believe in the eternality of evil. The assumption that evil does or can persist, puts an end at once to all hope, not to say conviction, of the sovereignty of good, and practically reestablishes the Manichean heresy which troubled the souls of the saints in the third century. The fundamental and innate conviction that the good and the true are and ought to be supreme by virtue of their inherent nature may be said to be universal among Christian men today, and this sense of legitmate dominion is not satisfied with any other conclusion than that evil will be dethroned and done away with in time; that it cannot maintain its present claim of place and sway throughout eternity.

With this conviction the great majority of those who, in opposition to the teaching of Christian Science, are declaring for the reality of evil would no doubt agree, and yet it must be apparent that if sin, disease, and death are real, the eternality of evil becomes inevitable, and pain and sorrow are sanctified by their association, if not by their identity with the things of God. From this point of view Mr. Chesterton is warranted in saying that "since Jesus suffered on the cross, a certain actuality and even sanctity has clung to the pain of prosaic men"!

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THE DENIAL OF SELF
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